Two chokepoints, one fire sale, and a 2mm gastropod. Here's what the week actually amounted to.
Start at the water. Six months into the war, the Strait of Hormuz has settled into a stalemate that suits Washington: most Iranian oil stays off the market, American escorts keep the traffic moving, and Tehran gets to watch its revenue drain while nothing changes. Stalemates are only stable for the side that can afford to wait. Iran can't, so the escalation is aimed at breaking the shape of the thing rather than winning inside it.
Then the other end of the Arabian Peninsula gave way. Saudi Arabia lost both of its export routes as the Houthis reached Bab el-Mandeb, which turns a long-running nuisance into a structural problem for Riyadh. MBS called Trump twice on Thursday and asked for strikes. He got intelligence sharing and targeting support instead, and the refusal itself is the story worth reading twice. Washington will help you see the target. Aiming is your problem now.
The money moved to physical things
Friday's wire had a texture you don't see often. Reactors, cathode plants, industrial printers, $161 million going into a space reactor award while a genomics firm chases whole-genome scale. The AI money was there, but it was pointed at hardware and buildings rather than at models.
The software side of the ledger got uglier. Bending Spoons picked up Miro at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion, roughly a tenth of what the company was once worth on paper. Collaboration whiteboards were the most 2021 asset class imaginable, and this is the bill for that.
Meanwhile Sam Altman told staff OpenAI is weighing a slowdown in frontier development, and Oracle's cloud revenue jumped 121% in the same news cycle. One of those is a statement of intent. The other is a number. Numbers win.
Jensen Huang, speaking at Goldman's conference, went further and named cybersecurity as AI's next big market. His reasoning is circular in the most profitable way possible: AI writes the code, AI probes the code, and somebody has to sell the defence. Demand that manufactures itself is the best kind to own.
If you want to see what that code actually looks like now, the 2026 review of Lovable, Bolt.new, Replit Agent, v0 and Base44 is worth an hour. The pretty-landing-page era is finished. These tools ship auth, databases, payments and deployment in a single pass, which is exactly why Huang's point lands.
Governance, briefly
Automattic had a 48-hour board coup and Mullenweg took control back. The company still employs thousands of people and still owns WordPress.com, Tumblr, WooCommerce and Pocket Casts, so the short answer to whether it's still a thing is yes. The longer answer is more interesting.
In Ireland, planners told the operator of Trump's Doonbeg resort to redo the ecological paperwork behind a ballroom, because of a snail about two millimetres long. The comparison with wind farms waiting years for planning permission writes itself, and it doesn't flatter anyone.
Things that are just good
Lisbon left the Carmo Convent roofless on purpose. The arches spring, curve, meet at the crown, and then there's nothing but sky, which is how the city chose to remember 1 November 1755. A ruin kept as a ruin says more than a reconstruction ever could.
Syracuse has no town beach, so Ortigia swims off the rocks: a shelf of cracked grey limestone with towels laid across it, and a drop straight into the Ionian.
And on the business of holding names rather than using them, nine domains came up for renewal and all nine got paid for, including a run of AI inference names, Technography.org and B4N.net. The invoice arrives with a question attached to every line. Most lines answer in about four seconds.
